Easter Craft: Easy Easter Decorations

Easter crafts that your children can make CAN become an actual decoration in your house, not just a keepsake.  Using an old gift bag and tissue paper, we created two really cute wall hangings.

SUPPLIES NEEDED:

• Gift bag (old or new)
• Tissue paper (old or new – it is going to get crumpled)
• Glue
• Construction paper
• Old cardboard or foam board
• Tape
• Scissors

PREPARING YOUR CRAFT SUPPLIES:

The crucial key to a successful craft with your children is to have the supplies all ready.  Your children will lose interest quickly if they have to sit still and watch Mommy do a bunch of gathering and sorting.

Trace a circle from a plate for the chick decoration. I suggest using yellow paper to keep the chick all one color.

Draw a decorated egg on construction paper.  We used the same color paper as we wanted the tissue decoration to be.  This makes it easy to color match for the children, plus it keeps white paper coming through in between the pieces of tissue paper.

Cut the colors of tissue paper in square-ish shapes.  It doesn’t have to be exact because the kids are going to be crumpling them up.  I went ahead and did half of the crumpling ahead of time.  I knew my young children would lose interest after a bit.  This way they got to finish up for me.

Go ahead and cut your cardboard pieces or foamboard now, too.  It is too hard for children to do this step and you don’t want them getting hurt. Doing this step ahead of time stops the argument of who is going to cut before it even starts.

PUTTING YOUR DECORATIONS TOGETHER:

Have your children cut out the circle and the egg from the paper.  Be sure to have them cut the egg in its sections, too.

Take the egg sections you want in a different color and trace them onto that color paper.  My kids used a pencil, but pencil doesn’t show well in photos.  I do not recommend using a marker for tracing unless your children are older.

Now your children can cut the colored egg sections.  It doesn’t have to be exact.  These pieces are going to get covered by tissue paper.  If your children are too small to cut,you can have this step done already or you can trace with them and then cut the pieces yourself while they are squishing up the tissue paper into wads.

Take your gift bag and let your kids cut it in half vertically.  You want to keep the large side faces intact.

Now just wrap the gift bag pieces around one side of the cardboard.  We had an empty box lying around that I cut up.  I wrapped, but the kids taped for me.

Now have your children glue the tissue paper balls to the coordinating pieces of colored paper.  The easiest way is to just spread a thin layer of glue over the paper and let your children push the tissue pieces on.

Now glue the tissue covered pieces onto the boards.

While the children are gluing the tissue pieces on, you can draw some eyes for the chick and a beak.  The kids will probably want to cut these out themselves, too.  So if you kids are not doing the cutting I would have this done ahead of time.

We thought the chick needed something so we grabbed one chenille stem and made some legs for the chick.

I cut two pieces about 2.5 inches long for the legs.  I them cut two more pieces about 2 inches long.  I wrapped the 2 inch pieces around the legs and angled them to look like little feet.

Now you have some seriously cute decorations that came from one fun craft.  Oh, and good luck getting your child to hand it over so you can display it.  She was definitely very proud of her creation.